Francesca Gentille

Rabia Erduman

Episode 84: DEEP SEX: DARE TO LOVE YOUR SELF with Rabia Erduman

DEEP SEX: DARE TO LOVE YOUR SELF with Rabia Erduman. Born & raised in Turkey and then Germany, she was very sick until 19. Tantra became her main path to healing. Certified Hypnotherapist, Visionary Craniosacral worker, Teacher of Intutive Touch, Polarity Therapy, Tantra, and Spiritual Awakening.

In this episode, Rabia reveals her personal path of healing through Tantra. Discover how to transmute anger into loving self- acceptance and joy. Learn a simple visualization that brings healing to the body. Unblock what stops love in your life. Practice a visualization of merging and harmonizing with your Inner Intimate. Celebrate having a Soft On. Unfurl into deep trust and friendship with all beings.

Transcript

Francesca Gentille:
Welcome to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra:
Bringing You The Soul of Sex. I’m your host, Francesca
Gentille, and with me today is Rabia Erduman.. Rabia was born
and raised in Turkey and
then in Germany
and was very sick for a long time, and it was tantra and it was the tantra work
that really helped her heal. She’s a certified Hynotherapist, a visionary
craniosacral worker, a teacher of intuitive touch, polarity therapy, tantra and
spiritual awakening workshops, and I’m delighted to have her with us today.
Welcome Rabia.

Rabia Erduman: Thank you.

Francesca Gentille:
Rabia one of the things that intrigued me so much, and I’m imaging our
listening audience will be intrigued as well, is how did you experience that
tantra actually helped you heal?

Rabia Erduman: When I bumped into the chakra system through
the tantric work a long time ago in India, I could feel how my chakras,
chakras are energies in the body. The term chakra means a wheel, they’re like
circular energies in the body. If lets say the heart, chakra is disconnected
from the third chakra, which is right in the stomach area, which is fire, there
was too much fire in my system, not enough water and earth. So it created this
imbalance in my system, which created a lot of illness in my stomach area.
Learning about the chakras, I understood, “Oh, I need to do the healing, help
the fire energy in my digestive system balance with my water in my genital area
and the earth right in our sixth bone area, it slows it down and brings it all
into balance. So that’s what took, took place.

Francesca Gentille:
Now let me, lets go a little deeper into that because the chakra’s are those
wheels of energy in the body that line up along the, the spinal, the spinal
column, are very inalgous to the organ…

Rabia Erduman: Right.

Francesca Gentille:
in terms of the importance of the body, and in the Asian cultures they studied
that, as well as, as the body, the heart, the lungs, and they, they have a more
spiritual and energetic way of looking at it. So when you say that you started
to hear about the chakras, there was something that this brining in the more
spiritual, the more energetic, that really, and that sense of disease being,
disease being out of balance and coming into balance that really helped you. Now
was it, what was it? Was it breathing? Was it visualization? Was it certain
foods that are aligned with the chakras? What was that pathway? How did the
chakras become a map in a way of noticing what was out of balance and a pathway
to bringing yourself into balance?

Rabia Erduman: That’s a wonderful question. It was almost,
it really, it was feeling like a certain stuck area in my body, then getting a
sense of what chakra that connected to, like the organ of a stomach, you know,
and then getting a sense of what feelings are stuck there. It was, for me it
was repressed anger. I had to be a good girl as a child to get my survival
needs met and approval from mom and dad and all that. So all the natural
childhood anger couldn’t be suppressed, so then my stomach started accruing and
at the age of 19 I ended up with hernia surgery, you know. So that got me to
really looking, “Hmm, what’s wrong here, you know?” But then when I looked at
the chakra system through tantra, I realized, oh, repressed anger. Then I started
playing around with it, you know, with the breathing exercises of tantra, the
tantra Yoga techniques, movement, and connecting then the fire. What happens is
when we breathe love from our heart chakra into the anger, the suppressed anger
in the stomach, then the anger starts transforming. So the fire then starts
being able to transform into this healthy laughter, without the fire it’s this
exciting inspiration, you know.

Francesca Gentille:
You know, this is, this is so resonant for me, so it really relates to me at
this moment in my life because my mom died about a year ago, and what surprised
me so much was I, it wasn’t a surprise that I grieved and I felt sad and that
sometimes a moment of joy and then I’d be crying because I’d think of her and think
how she would enjoy something or how much I enjoyed it with her, but what
surprised me the most was the anger…

Rabia Erduman: Yes.

Francesca Gentille:
The anger that came up, that feeling, like you said, that you have to, have to
be a good person, have to be, suppress myself in certain ways, and I think this
is very common for many of us is that we literally cut off, suppress, reject or
deny pieces of ourselves in order to be liked or loved by our family, by our
friends, by our loved ones, and then, and we wonder why we’re sick and we
wonder why we’re depressed and we wonder why we’re irritated. And its just been
so stirred up in me this year. So maybe, I’d love to go through all the
chakras, but perhaps we could start with the heart. Do you have an exercise or
would you be willing to guide us through that, something around that
transmuting the energy of anger into something that can move in the body or be
transmuted into love or laughter?

Rabia Erduman: So when you think of the heart, the heart
chakra is the whole chest and upper back. The physical heart is to the left
side. Then right in between our breast is the heart that can feel feelings and
emotions, and a little bit above that where the timeless gland is, is what we
call the spiritual heart filled with emerald green color right in the spiritual
heart like it goes all the way from front to the back, covers he whole chest
right there, and that’s where unconditional love sits. Always that
unconditional love is always right here. And I really believe in self-love, you
know, loving myself first. So then feeling this beautiful emerald green
unconditional love, coming down to your stomach area where the anger itself.
Imagine this emerald green love is just spreading and embracing this old anger.
It’s being loved, the anger energy, that fire energy’s being loved, total
accepted, and yet through the love we don’t have to be destructive or
self-destructive with it anymore. So that emerald green love from the
unconditional heart threading into your stomach/liver area just embraces that
old anger, the fire energy that was stuck in the old anger is allowed through
the love to transform into the laughter, into inspiration, into that sense of,
“Yes, this is my life and I can do this”, to feel that joy right there.

Francesca Gentille:
Hmm, I’m just breathing that in, breathing, relaxing the jaw, relaxing the
belly and breathing that sense of this emerald green love and acceptance, total
acceptance going throughout my entire chest and down into my belly, and ah, that
feels, that feels wonderful. I could do that for another hour.

Rabia Erduman: Great, me too. I love it.

Francesca Gentille:
I want to do more, these are beautiful exercises, things that we can, you know,
take home right now, do right now, take home right now, share with our beloved
or share more deeply with our self. I love that idea of the self, the sense
lover and want to go deeper into that after a break and a word from our
fabulous sponsors. And I want to encourage our listening audience to support our
sponsors because that allows shows like this to keep coming to you. And we’ll
be right back.

Francesca Gentille:
Welcome back to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex. We’re
talking with Rabia Erduman, delicious tantrica, originally from Turkey,
Germany, now with us in Monterey California, who has found that tantra helped
heal her and now uses that among her many modalities to help heal others. And
when you and I were talking, before the show we were saying that that, there
was a template of self-love that really, and then meshing that with the tantric
system, that really brought beauty into your life. Could you, could you share
more about, you know, how that works? What does that mean?

Rabia Erduman: Great question. So what happened is when I
was younger and wanting a relationship, and I really thought if a man loved me
then that would make me good enough. And really break-ups and difficulties and
hard heart breaks, and I realized one day, “Oh wow, I’m not loving myself. So
how can I even draw a loving man into my life?” There was a big opening,
realizing, “Oh, I need to love me first.” That part in this inner make, inner
lover into my life, like the feminine part of me, then met inside of me the
masculine part of me. And then, being in this tantric union inside of me
together created this incredible ecstatic experience inside of me. Then what
happened is because I wasn’t needing a man to be happy outside, I was happy
already inside, then I could be open to men, to receive love and sexuality with
them and sensuality and intimacy’s really the word in tantra. I go for intimacy
in a big old chakras kind of way, yeah? So…

Francesca Gentille:
Now, what you’re saying is so brilliant, and I long to hear you say more about
that, is that idea that if I turn to you as my beloved, like you’re my sixth,
you’re my addiction, you’re my, save me, fix me, change me, that’s a lot of
pressure on you, and…

Rabia Erduman: That’s right.

Francesca Gentille:
And you’re probably going to fail. You’re not going to be everything that I
need. How could you be? How could you be that mind reader that knows in every
moment what I need? And so there’s this journey that you’re talking about to
turn inward and say, “How can I be my lover? How can I… I’m the one who knows
what I want. I’m the one that feels what I feel. How can I bring that to
myself?” And how do we do that? How, what are some, you know, it’s a beautiful
idea, but are there some practices that we can take on that would help us heal
the anger sometimes if we didn’t get the love we wanted as children or in the
past, and really allow ourselves to come home to our own bodies, to our own
throne heart?

Rabia Erduman: That’s a journey I do about the inner lover,
like, we’re meeting the inner feminine, inner masculine inside of us, and then
really having them mate and merge right inside of us right at the midline of
the body. And then any old feelings come up that way of course, then the
heart’s chakra meditation I guided you before can help that. What happens is,
what happened in my personal life is my acceptance of the man increased. This
one lover of mine, bless his heart, he was older than me, like fifteen years
older, and in the middle of making love he would get soft at times, yeah. And
then I would just totally, because I don’t, I didn’t need him to be hard to
feel good about myself, you know. I would be in my ecstasy and loving myself
and loving him and having an orgasm just by looking at him, and then I would
just play with his lingam, with his penis, and one day he, he said to me this
is the first time in his life he’s not feeling intimidated when he gets a soft
on. ‘Cause as we’re playing and laughing he would get hard again, and we’d play
in different ways, you know. It was such fun.

Francesca Gentille:
I love the idea of a soft on. You know, that you could have a hard on and you
could have a soft on, and it’s all good that all of it gets to be accepted,
there’s not judgment, that it’s like waves of the ocean, you know, it peaks and
then it, and then it ebbs, and it’s all, it’s all intimacy, it’s all sensation.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille:
And that sounds like such a healing practice in and of itself, I love that. And
is there a meditation or a visualization that you could guide us through about
that merging of the inner masculine and the inner feminine? And by the midline,
do you mean the heart chakra, in the center of the chest or some other part of
the body?

Rabia Erduman: It’s all the way down…

Francesca Gentille:
Oh, you mean like the…

Rabia Erduman: Yeah, you know, like…

Francesca Gentille:
Oh, you mean the spinal column.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly.

Francesca Gentille:
Is that what you mean? Okay.

Rabia Erduman: Exactly, yes. But just imagine our masculine
energies in the right side of the body, all the way up and down our right arm
and right leg and right side of our trunk. And feminine energy is at the left
side of the body, our left arm, left leg, left side of our trunk. Just feeling
now, right at the, where you are sitting, if you are sitting, where our
tailbone is, our anus is, that’s the first chakra and that’s red in color.
Feeling that dark red, earth element. And just move your attention now to your
pelvic area and lower back, feeling the vibrant orange of the second chakra,
water element. And the dark red and the vibrant orange are now coming together,
creating a rainbow of light, rainbow of colors, filling up in your stomach
area, solar plexus and mid back golden yellow. That’s the fire element, third
chakra. Now all three colors are together in the rainbow energy. And feeling
now up in your heart, your chest and upper back, heart chakra, air element,
emerald green and pink. Just feeling all colors connecting now in the rainbow.
And then the throat chakra, throat and neck is light blue and turquoise, adding
itself to the rainbow. And just feeling the third eye is right around the, our
center of our forehead in between our eyebrows, dark purple and dark blue,
coming to join the rainbow light throughout our body. Then finally at the crown
chakra that’s just at the top of our head, is this brilliant white with gold in
it, feeling the rainbow cut light of the chakras that are all connected into
one rainbow light. It’s extending itself to the right and left. It’s embracing
the inner masculine to the right and the inner feminine to the left of your
body. Imagine the rainbow light of the chakras bringing in the feminine and
masculine to hold hands with each other and to hug each other, to hold each
other, to really connect, full body, intimate connection of the inner feminine
and the inner masculine merging with each other into this incredibly intimate,
ecstatic union.

Francesca Gentille:
Mmm. Ah, that is gorgeous. That is so gorgeous. And as I listen to it it
reminds me of the power of visualization…

Rabia Erduman: Yes.

Francesca Gentille:
that throughout so many cultures, shamanic cultures, indigenous cultures,
spiritual cultures, the sense of vision, the sense of journey really, literally
transforms our body, that as we experience through vision something our immune
system shifts, our internal system shifts. So gorgeous. And I want to go even
deeper into more of this after a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors,
and we’ll be right back.

Francesca Gentille:
Welcome back to Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex with
the delightful Rabia, tantrica, beautiful woman of vision and visualization.
And, you know, Rabia here we have, we’re transmitting our anger, we’re coming
into a sacred union in our own bodies, and is there a point then where, and
what is that, where we get to bring that into relationship with another?

Rabia Erduman: Yeah, excellent question. That’s where a lot
of times our old patterns get projected onto our partners. If I believe I
wasn’t loved as a child, then I’m expecting my partner to not love me. What
happens then in tantric work is the couple, when we’re like bringing the
tantric breathing exercises, visualizations, the chakras connecting our
chakras, then I feel how my inner child didn’t get loved by my father, lets
say, but I’m able to really disconnect my partner from my dad. I realize, “Oh,
my partner is my lover and my friend. Those are the two big words in
relationship for me; lover and friend, friend and lover. Yup.

Francesca Gentille:
Mm hmm.

Rabia Erduman: And in the tantric work I’m able to separate
my dad from my partner. Thing is, dad didn’t know how to love me back then, but
my partner is not my dad. He’s my friend and my lover. So in the tantric work
with the chakras is the chakras are connecting with my partner, especially the
heart chakra, we’re able to create friendship first, you know. Imagine you’re
totally trusting this person, whether your partner be a woman or a man, you
know he or she’s your friend. And I want to be able to share things very
differently with this, with this person, ‘cause I know they’re accepting who I
am, and if some issues are coming up, then as friends we’re working at them.
I’m not saying you’re wrong or I’m not saying I’m wrong, I’m saying here’s an
issue in our relationship, how can we create a win/win situation here? So by
the chakra work, the breathing exercises, the holding hands, connecting our
chakras, well we’re then looking at life, oh, date night. I am big on once a
week date night. Even if it’s five minutes, date night doesn’t have to be a
couple of hours. Five minutes date night goes a long way. That moment of
looking into each other’s eyes, holding your hand, each other’s hands and then
maybe the kids aren’t there and you have to have dinner, you know. That five
minutes goes a long way. So my suggestion is like starting with five minutes of
just holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, “Wow, he’s my friend”,
“She’s my friend”, “He’s not my enemy”, “She’s not my enemy”, yeah? We’re
friends here doing this life together, supporting each other, creating win/win
situations here.

Francesca Gentille:
Mm, Rabia that is so beautiful. So often, whether it’s with a friend, whether
it’s with a beloved, whether it’s with a family member, we can forget, “Oh
wait, underneath this all really you are my friend. Underneath all of this, you
know, drama and trauma and fear of what I might over give or lose, really
you’re my friend.” And that’s such a beautiful visualization, to look into
another’s eyes, hold hands, just get present for a moment to that friend, the
friend in the soul of the other.

Rabia Erduman: Right.

Francesca Gentille:
You know, Rabia, it’s been a total delight to have you here on this show, and I
hope that we get to have you back again and again, and I’m so glad that I got
to meet you through my mentor Steven Brazeman, who also has wonderful
interviews here on Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra. But how would people get a hold
of you? How can they learn more about you and connect with your work?

Rabia Erduman: They can visit my website and Steven and I
teach couples tantra workshops together also. So my web address, it’s a strange
one, it’s wuweiwu, w-u-w-e-i-w-u, dot com. And my phone number is 831-642-2358.

Francesca Gentille:
Mm, and you were mentioning to me that some of these visualizations you
actually have on tape for people.

Rabia Erduman: That’s right, I wrote a book, it’s my own
healing journey in a fairytale form, and I have full guided imagery of CD’s,
like my voice guiding you through journeys with some music in the background.
One of them is Chakra, Chakra Journey. And then I have a relaxation CD, a
meditation CD, an inner guide CD. So the Chakra Journey is really very big part
of the tantric work.

Francesca Gentille:
Hmm. Thank you so much for living this life, for being on this journey, for
being the embodied healer, the lifelong learner, the precious soul that you
are, and thank you for being with us on the show.

Rabia Erduman: Thank you so much Francesca. This was fun. This
was very delightful.

Francesca Gentille:
And I want to thank you, our listening audience, for being on this journey with
us because we know that you are and we know that we’re all connected in
bringing more harmony, more wholeness, more holiness into our planet in all we
do, especially in our relationship and our sexuality. And if you want to learn
more about Rabia, read her bios, see her beautiful picture, get connected to
her and her work or find out about more, about me, my bio and my work, you can
do that at www.personallifemedia.com,
www.personallifemedia.com, Sex:
Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You The Soul Of Sex.